Dreams
by StArBarD
Summary: John lies awake at night in a state of half dreaming, half rousing delirium. He can't tell if what he's seeing is real or not.
1. Chapter 1

**I'm not sleeping anymore. This sprouted from that. John will be largely sleepy through most of this.**

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He lay curled in the warmth of his bed; the cushy, plush, clean hell of his ravaging dreams and waited patiently in the unconscious haze between dreams and wakefulness. This was his private torture: being so completely exhausted he could not bear to wake, yet being so completely alert of the mind that sleep escaped him. Every few hours he would glance at the clock, aware of the night rapidly dwindling into nothingness, yet not sure how to alter its speed.

He lay, half under his blanket; arms flung up in half-surrender, caressing the pillows beneath his head waiting for blackness to turn to dreams or darkness to turn to morning. The red lights of his alarm clock burned into the back of his mind like a brand, hot and painful as they ticked away the hours till five.

Eleven came and went under his watchful eye; then in a flash twelve crept upon him. He could not tell what consciousness was and what sleep was, except by the numbers that continued moving steadily upwards. In a flash twelve became two, as he nodded off, barely recognizing the sleep for what it was, and John stopped caring for time anymore.

He merely wanted some significant rest before work, at six. In a dreary haze the minutes flew past, unwatched and unwanted. No dreams visited the restless sleeper, which was a blessing in itself, yet neither did sleep ease his aching body or calm his warring mind.

John became duly aware of the floor groaning, but believed only that a dream had finally fallen upon him and cursed his bad luck. He'd had dreams before of someone being in the flat. There was no one in the flat.

He felt a shadow ease across his bed with a sigh, causing the old cushion to groan and complain. John still only registered only half of the sensation, being drunk on the fumes of Morpheus which he had sought so greedily mere minutes before. The sensation of pressure was nothing new in his dreams. With his PTSD griping him at every waking turn, he often had dreams so vivid; he had trouble convincing himself they were only in his mind. Heat, pressure, noise, all was a part of his nightly schedule.

Hands clamped down over his own, and he still felt, in a detached sense, that he was dreaming. His mind rolled with exhaustion and he wondered without words what tricks his sleep addled brain was trying to play on him _now_. The iron grip of the hands mingled with his fingers and he felt his heartbeat in his hands; pulsating aggressively under pressure. His wrists were crying out with surprise being buried in the plush pillow

Something pressed against his neck, sucking slightly and the pain in his shoulder startled him bolt-upright in his bed, gasping in surprise at the empty room lit only by detached shreds of moonlight that pierced through his blinds and stabbed into his bed.

He rubbed his trick-shoulder that had been aggravated in a dream and sighed, rolling the bone beneath the puckered scar and tracing over the bumpy ridges with his finger; shuddering in disgust and awe.

He was alone in his room. Alone in his flat. There was no one with him at all. He mulled over these depressing thoughts until he could hardly stand it, but he still couldn't shake the sensation that had left him sweating in the dark, panting. His heart was trying to burst out of his chest by hammering against the walls as fast and as hard as it could.

"No one's here. Can't you see that?" he told himself for the final time. Alone and scared, he practiced the deep breathing exercises that his therapist had been teaching him.

He couldn't fight, however, the gnawing feeling that he was missing something. He checked the clock. It said three-forty-four. He groaned tremendously and rolled himself out of bed, flinching slightly as his bare feet touched his soft, downy slippers on the floor. He went to his nightstand by the window and quietly pulled the drawer open. Blindly, he groped in the dark cave, over magazines and pens, searching for his gun.

It wasn't there.

John started the breathing exercises again.

"Okay, no need to panic." He told himself quite rationally. "I've been a bit scatterbrained lately; I may have left it out in the living room."

Having nothing else to do, he decided to get out of bed and check.

The sitting room of the flat was a tomb of shadows. Every piece of furniture had a halo of light around it as moonlight hit the cloud of dust that perpetually drifted in the flat. John largely ignored the dust as he searched for his gun in the dark, running his hand over every flat surface and even some of the sofa.

When he had finished running over the sofa he thought to himself "This is dumb! I'm going to be exhausted for work! I should be asleep!" and he angrily went to search for it in the kitchen as a last resort.

The kitchen was spotless, and at first glance it was obvious that the gun was not there. Every counter was clear except for one to the right of the fridge. One single glass of milk waited patiently for someone to drink it. John picked up the chilled glass, deciding at a glance that he had poured it before he'd gotten that phone call from Sarah and gone to bed. He emptied it into the sink, letting the beads of icy water collect on his fingertips and the pale, creamy fluid coat the sink briefly before disappearing.

His gun was gone. He couldn't find it anywhere. Not that it was really important that night. There was no one in the flat, he could see that.

"Mycroft." He came to the conclusion a few seconds after he'd searched his nightstand. Only the eldest Holmes would have the audacity to come into his home and take his gun, because only the oldest Holmes thought he was a risk with it.

Okay, he'd threatened to use it on him _one time,_ but only because of all the surprise visits and kidnappings. He really didn't care for Mycroft anymore, and didn't appreciate being treated like a suicide risk.

He put the glass in the sink, rinsed it out and wearily trudged back to his bedroom. Sleep was calling him, with its coy smile and shy touch, and he was too seduced by it to pretend to resist.

He collapsed into the bed, too tired to care about anything, not wanting to see the numbers of the clock, not wondering what had happened to his gun, beloved keep-sake of his adventures, begging to Morpheus for a dream to launch him off into another two hours of rest before he was forced to face that day.

Only one thing gnawed at the back of his mind. _The milk was ice cold._


	2. Chapter 2

A new night, a new sleep, no dreams. He lay awake, tossing like a barrel in the ocean, caught in a tempest. Twelve came and he was exhausted, but One never came after. He reached out and found a dream that seized his fancy and lifted off into some dark wonderland.

It was bliss, but too soon he found the same half-dream upon him as it had the night before.

The door cracked, but this time something new was added; a sudden flood of light, extinguished in a flash which left John wondering if he'd seen it at all. The floor creaked as something crept steadily closer in the darkness, pausing for a single heartbeat, and then continuing to prowl. Something swept over his bed in a sigh of rustling bed sheets and clothes.

John looked for his clock, but couldn't find it. He was dreaming then. He sank back and his breathing became heavy and dense, and darkness stole over his mind like clouds before the moon, clotting all light and turning his thoughts to a haze.

Something leaned over his prostrate body in the shadows, something breathed cold wind into his neck, something crept up his arms, caressing the muscles tenderly and reaching for his wrists.

Something leapt over him, moving the bed and jarring him into semi-wakefulness, pinning his legs with the crushing weigh of a body.

John moaned slightly, as one disturbed in a passing dream. The sensations were unfamiliar, and in a moment of sleepy clarity he wondered if he was dreaming at all.

Hands clamped down over his own, pressing them painfully into the cushion with surprising force. Then a gentle steady motion pulled his hands up, up, up; sliding over the sheets and building wrinkles till his hands were level with his head.

His shoulder screamed in defiance and John woke completely from his exhausted slumber into a blaze of pain that dulled his senses as effectively as sleep.

Awake, John became aware of several things that should have struck him immediately, had he been conscious. He listed them in rapid succession as he struggled to grasp the unfamiliar situation, ignoring the biting pain that fueled his adrenaline high.

He smelled something foreign. Something vaguely musky which clamped down over his nose and choked out all fresh air. Some kind of vapor that lingered on the shadow.

Whatever was on him had distributed its body weight in just the right way, so that he found it impossible to overpower it. He tried to yank his good arm free, but the paralyzing weight crushing his arms into the mattress left no chance of escape. He tried to work his knees from their trap, but whatever it was crushing him was too large, too powerful.

He groaned in pain as a face in the darkness leapt forward, nuzzling his neck and causing his head to roll over his pillow languidly, as though the bones in his neck had given up on supporting him.

"Who?" He whispered, startling himself with the sound of his own voice, breaking through the silence with the chilling tone of reality.

"Shhhh…" a soft, sibilant hissing erupted by his ear. "It'ss alright." The breathless whispering brought a gust of steamy air trickling over his face.

John jerked his arms, slipping one of them away from the hand that pinned his wrist and clumsily swiping the air with his fist. To his shock, he connected with something, which groaned powerfully and rolled off of him.

Suddenly free of his burden, John leapt off the bed. He lunged for the drawer he kept his gun tucked away in, yanking open the drawer and sifting through the magazines with his shaking fingers.

It was empty.


	3. Chapter 3

John sensed the stranger in his room shifting in the darkness, moving in the shadows. He tried to penetrate the darkness, peering around blindly, but all the light was dead. Even the moon had abandoned him to the pit of blackness.

He stood up and the darkness yawned before him, spinning around him dizzyingly, he stumbled forward in a disorientated haze. He threw out his arms like a blind man as he staggered forward into the black sheet that hid a stranger from his vision.

He thought, if he could only reach the door, he could throw it open and cast the light he saw before into the room, he could see his attacker. Or better still, he could escape.

He heard footsteps echoing dully against the wood of his floor, footsteps not his own and he realized the person he had stunned was also searching for him blindly, or perhaps not so blindly, in the shadows.

It was a race then, a race to the door, a race for freedom. John grasped at the darkness, leaping in an indiscriminate direction towards where he thought the door was approximately. He cursed the fact that he'd stepped through that door every day for years, yet he was still uncertain where it was in correlation to his bed.

Finally, John touched wood, after an eternity of about ten seconds. His fingertips crashed into the familiar carved wood of the door and hurriedly he scrambled to find the metal doorknob.

The footsteps of his pursuer were getting closer, or could they have been the rolling beat of his heart quickening? John didn't know, he only knew that when he suddenly gripped the metal knob, when he felt the reassuring chill of the false gold, he leapt back to open the door and something slammed against his nearly naked body pinning him to the door and sealing it shut.

He threw his elbow a few times, hoping to stun whoever had him pressed between the door and their body. The feeling of smooth fabric rubbing against every part of his trapped form, his back, legs and arms gave him a delirious vision of his attacker, an impossible delusion.

Whoever was driving him against the wood seized his trick shoulder and smashed it against the door while gripping the back of his head to keep him from twisting in recoil. The only thing John could do in response was utter a small, pained groan that felt like all his frustrations and agonies welling up and escaping like helium from a slit balloon.

He felt a narrow stinging, like ice against his skin burning his already-damaged shoulder. The hand that had gripped his hair released its grip and let him fall into the door weakly, bumping his forehead with a muffled sound, while it preoccupied itself with grasping at his exposed thigh. John clasped the hand and attempted weakly to peel it off, but the ice that had been burning his shoulder had bled across his collar bone and sapped the strength out of his arms. The hand that gripped his shoulder mercifully let go and, as though anticipating that John's next move was going to be a panicked cry for help, clamped down across the lower part of his face.

"Mrs.…Mrs.…mauh…mmmmm…" John shrieked with the strength he wished he could find in his arms as the hand at his thigh moved up his leg tracing a delicate trail of goose pimples with its spidery fingers, pushing his boxers aside and seizing his hip by the bone. The sensation of ice had penetrated his heart and stomach, tracing fiery claw marks down his back.

His brazen attacker's chest was lain out across John's back, flattening him further into the door and forcing his buttocks into his attacker's pelvis. The raw embarrassment this caused was almost more than John could bare, as he fought once more, with the last of his efforts to wrench himself out of the foreign grasp of the stranger.

It was pure luck, then, that the burning, stinging icy numbness that had been crawling through his veins, spreading like a creeping vine, hit his legs and suddenly caused his knees to collapse.

His feet slid out from under him and his captor removed the hand from where he'd been grabbing his hip and instead wrapped a steadying arm around his waist, keeping the other hand where it was sorely needed, stifling John's cries for help.

John dug into the exposed skin of the hands that held him with his fingernails, peeling back what he knew were sensitive areas over bones and veins, but in mere moments his clawing became weak pawing. The attacker gingerly spread him out on the dark floor of his room, keeping that crucial hand clamped tightly over his mouth.

John had a last ditch idea as the muscles in his arms and legs horrifically failed him, so sapped were they of strength. He opened his mouth and lunged at the hand which had gagged him, tearing into the skin with his teeth.

His attacker screamed softly and pulled back the hand, and John feebly cried "Mrs.…hush….Huhhhh…"

His head rolled back, exhausted. He hadn't any strength left. It dawned on him mutely that he'd been drugged.

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**I've never written anything like this before, it's kind of... idk, odd. Frightening I think. There's going t be a false ending in the next chapter, so anticipate more! I won't leave John alone. **


	4. Chapter 4

Whatever happened to him from that point was entirely up to someone else's mercy. The thought did not settle well at all in John's thoughts, which hummed with a gentle, tired pull towards unconciousness.

He gazed into the darkness, willing himself to see the form that had ambushed him as he slept, not wanting to go without seeing the face that had laid him out. He squinted as hard as he could, willing the form to suddenly materialize before his very eyes as a myriad of colors swirled and frothed in the pressing darkness, indicators of the toxin that was paralyzing him reaching his dazed brain.

All was blackness, and then all was bathed in a harsh yellow light. For some reason the person had deemed it necessary to turn on the small reading lamp that was still sitting on the undamaged side of John's bed. At least John would get his wish, if the attacker could see him, then he would be able to see his attacker.

As swirls of silver vapor tinged his vision and a different sort of darkness clawed at the still working gears of his mind, John prayed that whoever had assaulted him would hurry and show themselves, otherwise he couldn't be sure he could stay conscious long enough to see their face.

All he wanted was that closure. As the prospect of rescue slipped away moment by moment all he wanted was to see the person who was going to end him.

A figure finally walked around the edge of his bed and peered down at him but –_curses_- from a distance of more than three feet John's vision was too hazy to pick out any but the fuzziest details.

"Hullo Johnny boy, how _are_ you?" His attacker managed to say between pants.

"Did you miss me?" he purred, kneeling down on the ground beside John's prostrate body, all tingling with the curious numbness that now threatened to nullify his mind.

John felt a thrill of excitement upon seeing the figure stoop, and also the curious sensation that the floor had opened up beneath him and had swallowed him up. He knew, somehow knew exactly who had drugged him, jumping upon him in bed and torturing his shoulder as only a practiced sadist could. Still he needed the confirmation of his senses. He needed to see him.

The face that loomed in front of his eyes was smoky with the mists of fog swirling in wraiths around each feature. It was also unmistakable.

The black eyes that peered into his own frozen gaze were utterly pitch dark, like the eyes of a dog. The reflected his own pale face in their liquid pools, like two spots of oil. The coral mouth hung like a rosy crescent moon, grinning wolfishly, puffing short, hot bursts of breath into his face, forming words that bounced around John's ears without actually penetrating his thoughts.

"Don't worry though Johnny, we'll be together again soon,"

And with that only to comfort him, John slipped into the open mouth of the shadows that had danced solemnly just beyond his reach for too long, right where he had kept them for an insomniac year.


End file.
